Vending machines are well known and are employed to store and dispense a wide variety of merchandise, including beverages, snacks and sundries.
Vending machines provide benefits to both customers and proprietors. For customers, there is the convenience of self-service and twenty-four hour access. Similarly, vending machines are available as sales outlets for proprietors around the clock and without direct labor costs for the sales transactions themselves.
However, the simplicity of the vending machine experience is not in all ways advantageous. The customer's interaction with the machine, consisting of inserting payment, selecting a product to be purchased, and receiving the product, is sometimes not congruent with the brand image of the product purchased. For many products distributed by vending machines, and particularly beverages and some snacks, the brand of the product is highly cultivated by the product distributor or manufacturer to suggest favorable images having elements such as pleasure and fun. The typical vending machine experience does little to reinforce this brand image, except, perhaps, the presence of the brand displayed on the machine and on the product itself. While the product purchased may be pleasurable and fun in itself, the process of obtaining the product from the vending machine is routine and mechanistic.
It would be desirable if the experience of interacting with a vending machine were made enjoyable and entertaining to enhance and reinforce the brand messages promulgated by the distributors of products that are sometimes sold in vending machines. The present inventors have recognized that one way of enhancing the experience of interacting with the vending machine would be to expand the range of products available at the vending machine to include information items. Such information items may include audio recordings such as hit songs and/or video recordings such as music videos and may be selected to support and enhance the brand images of products sold through the vending machines.